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Right to be Forgotten

Recently Google issued a report into their involvement in the EU Right to be Forgotten providing statistics indicating that the majority of requests originate from Germany, France and the UK.

Google statistics show that they refuse roughly 70% of requests and that the most common reasons for individuals exercising their Right to be Forgotten are invasion of privacy, damage to reputation and damage to image.

Instances where the Right to be Forgotten are agreed to by Google impact links to social networks, content aggregators, blogs, press sites and Wikipedia although the vast majority of link removals are for Directories.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) specifically allows data subjects the Right to Erasure (Right to be forgotten) and it will be interesting to see how this right develops.